TFW reform a failure.
The unveiling of Jason Kenney’s reforms to the temporary foreign workers program was a sight to behold: a technical briefing, followed by an exhaustive ministerial news conference, accompanied by reams of supporting documentation, plus an oped piece by Kenney himself. Every minister should be so available, and so prepared.
And the reforms themselves? They will be widely praised, and should succeed in moving the controversial program off the front pages, adding to Kenney’s reputation as the safest pair of hands in cabinet. Unfortunately, that does not make them good policy.
Consider an employer in the manufacturing sector, who finds himself unable to attract enough workers for certain kinds of unskilled labour, at least at the going wage. He is entirely at liberty to outsource the work to a company overseas, paying a fraction of the wages he would have had to pay his Canadian employees. He can move the whole plant offshore if he likes, laying off every one of its current employees, and import the product he sells rather than make it here.
No government agency will forbid him to do so, or demand that he explain his decision to its satisfaction, showing what efforts he made to employ Canadians, and how many Canadians applied, and why they were not hired. No Minister of the Crown will lecture him on what wages he should pay, or limit the number of overseas workers he can employ, or for how long. His name will not be published on some departmental website, as if in scarlet letters, for easier hounding by the media.
He can do this regardless of what industry he is in, or whether he lives in an area of high unemployment or low: without permission, without hindrance, and without paying a fee — in sum, without any of the long list of conditions, restrictions and caveats he would now encounter should he bring the workers over here. Why might he do that? If they were the sorts of jobs that cannot be done overseas, but are locationspecific: service jobs, typically, which involve a certain person performing a certain task in a certain place, instead of making things that can be sent all over the world.
This is the crime of which these employers, whom Kenney vows to harass and punish with $100,000 fines, are guilty: operating a business while in the service sector. They “cost” no more jobs than their manufacturing counterparts. It’s just that the hard-working, low-wage foreigners they employ are in our midst, and visible to us, not toiling away in some sweatshop overseas we never see.
It was hard enough hiring foreign workers already. Anyone who imagines employers can simply pick people up off the street somewhere in Thailand has not begun to think of the logistical difficulties, not to say additional costs, this presents: It is highly unlikely many employers would do so to replace exist- ing staff. But the legal and bureaucratic obstacles the minister — of employment, ironically enough — has now placed in the way will make it nigh on impossible. Indeed, the department calculates the number of low-skilled workers in the program will be cut in half, from an already minuscule 31,000 to just over 16,000 — fewer than one out of every 1,000 persons employed in Canada.
It is gratifying that the restaurant industry, in particular, will no longer be under the absolute ban the minister slapped on in April, when the headlines were hottest. But it will still find itself arbitrarily denied access to the program in areas of the country where unemployment is higher than six per cent. There is no particular logic to this: It is quite possible for high levels of unemployment (accepting six per cent, which is less than the rate prevailing in most provinces at most times in the last 40 years, as “high”) to co-exist with shortages of certain types of labour.
But wait. Why should we want to make it easier for employers to hire overseas? Shouldn’t we insist they hire Canadians first? No, for the same reason we should not when it comes to outsourcing. If others can do a job better or cheaper than we can, it makes sense to let them do it and focus on the things we do best. Lower prices in the traded sectors leave consumers with more to spend creating employment in other areas. There’s no shortage of useful work to do.
The minister contends he is removing a “distortion” in the labour market, when in fact he is introducing one. By restricting the supply of unskilled labour, he hopes to drive up wages. But ultimately what underpins rising wages is not these sorts of artificial efforts to shoehorn people into low-wage employment, but rising productivity — for which the recipe is more education and higher rates of capital formation, not preventing willing employers from hiring willing employees.
It certainly won’t help the foreign workers themselves, who will now be subject, as a support group, the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, put it, to a kind of “mass deportation order.” Many had hoped to convert their demonstrable fitness for life in Canada into permanent residency, and ultimately citizenship. Those hopes will now be dashed.
Yet if any reform were needed, that remains the more promising route. If temporary foreign workers were not temporary, they would no longer be foreign. They would not be “taking jobs” from Canadians. They would be Canadians.